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Fresh Ingredients, Old Cookbook

Sometimes, inspiration is not enough to knock out a home run dish. You need a strong foundation to build your improvisational skills in the Test Kitchen. A good start involves a nostalgic return to the classics. For me, the fundamentals in working with social media go back to the Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff chef-d'oeuvre, Groundswell: Winning In a World Transformed by Social Technologies.

Their best practice, and a tried-and-true social media strategy called the POST method gives us a clear starting point for our campaigns. Here's the rundown:

P - People: We need to understand who our audience is in order to best engage them.

O - Objective: Clear and measurable objectives can help determine if we're successful or not.

S - Strategy: A winning strategy focuses on an effective transaction or value exchange between you and your audience.

T - Technology: Once we understand our people, objective, and strategy, we can then confidently adopt the necessary tools and tactics for a successful campaign.

So, before I reach for the pots and pans and get the burners warming on this amuse-bouche, I'll need to do an expeditious run through the POST method. The people or target audience that I've decided to focus on will be a community of learners. To be more specific, the students in my current CGS1060C summer course. As far as an objective, I'd like them to engage a bit more with the content and show knowledge acquisition on computer concepts. For strategy, this particular group can be motivated extrinsically by earning bonus points to supplement their discussion posts. I'll use Twitter as a platform to fill the technology need.

I expect to have measurable gains for students' grades through engagement with the course content. As the data comes in, I'll keep you posted. Oh my, see what I did there.

References
Li, C., & Bernoff, J. (2011). Groundswell: winning in a world transformed by social technologies. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press.

Comments

  1. This is the first time I have heard about POST method for a campaigns. It makes a lot of sense. :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you for reading. POST is definitely a good starting place to consider.

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